In spite of all of this, I think Jill and I would have been just fine if she hadn’t turned up on our front doorstep, three years ago, and moved into our house.
She arrived on Ruby’s due date. Just walked up our garden path with a large overnight bag and a box of dark chocolate truffles as I escorted a waddling Emma out for brunch. （I intensely dislike dark chocolate truffles, although I appreciate that’s neither here nor there.）
‘A very good morning to you both,’ she said, as if we’d been expecting her. ‘I’ll get settled in while you’re out. Kick off with some light manual labour.’
Emma had taken my hand and led me off down the road. ‘I told you I wanted her to help out,’ she said, gently. ‘When the baby came.’
What she had actually said was that she was worried about her postnatal mental health, and that she’d like to have Jill on standby in case things got bad. There had never been any mention of Jill moving in.
Jill stayed for two weeks after Ruby’s birth. There we were; shell-shocked, exhausted, having to squeeze around a third party in an already tiny space. Ultimately, I think Emma regretted inviting her, too – as the postnatal depression rolled in like a combat tank, it was me she clung to, not Jill.
In the end I had to chalk it up to some intense expression of friendship I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand. Sympathy for Jill, perhaps, who had apparently longed for a baby herself. Maybe a pact they’d made as young women. Either way, it was no time to start an argument with Emma. Jill eventually returned to her flat and I said nothing.
Jill and Emma’s monthly rendezvous is tonight, so I’ve retreated to our tiny study to get on with Emma’s stock. It will take time to turn the grief-stricken passages in my notebook into something publishable, but I have whiskey and fig rolls and at least two more hours before Emma will be home.
Our house is sheathed in a thick veil of foliage, which I am quite certain is causing damage to the fabric of the building, but Emma refuses to do anything about it. Through the ever-narrowing frame hanging around our window, I see a silky mauve sky, from which light is fading fast.
I reread the opening section, rolling one of Ruby’s marbles around my desk.
Marine ecologist and television presenter Emma Bigelow, who has died at the age of ??, was an enthusiastic collector of abandoned dogs, and widely credited with putting Britain’s coastal ecosystems on the popular conservation map.
She was a role model for women in marine biology, winning awards and fellowships that had for decades prior been reserved for men. ‘Worth twenty of the insipid corvid-worshippers that normally front this sort of programme’ （The Times; October 2014）， Bigelow presented two series of the BBC’s popular This Land, from 2013–15. An anonymous Instagram account was set up after the first series, dedicated to clips of her trademark windmill-like gesticulations. Bigelow was delighted.
After two series Emma Bigelow returned to her teaching posts at the University of Plymouth and University College London. ‘I’m more sea squirt than I am human,’ she said at the time, ‘so I’m very happy to be back in the intertidal zone, although I’ll miss the free lunches terribly.’
I haven’t mentioned that she said this to me in floods of tears, or that when she did so I was running around beating my chest, threatening to sue the BBC for unfair dismissal.
Emma Merry Bigelow was born into the peripatetic life of a military child, stationed variously in Plymouth, Taunton and Arbroath. Her father was a Royal Marine chaplain and her mother, who died shortly after Bigelow was born, a Classics graduate.
I stop reading.
I’m not satisfied with this.
Good obit writers sound like they knew the deceased: it’s what we’re paid to do. But those of us who spend our lives reading them – who discuss them on nerd forums and go to obit conferences, who read the obit books and articles and compilations – we can tell the difference. Had I not written this myself, I would have put good money on the writer of this obit never having met Emma. None of her unique magic is here.